COMUNAS AND INDIGENOUS PROTEST IN CAYAMBE, ECUADORmarcbecker.org/research/comunas.pdf · 532 COMUNAS AND INDIGENOUS PROTEST IN CAYAMBE, ECUADOR Map 1: Comunas in Ecuador (1937-1973)

The Americas55:4 April 1999, 531-559Copyright by the Academy of AmericanFranciscan History

COMUNAS AND INDIGENOUS PROTEST INCAYAMBE, ECUADOR*

The 1930s was a period of slow and painful capitalist formation inthe Ecuadorian highlands. Marginalized Indigenous peoples'

who lived in rural areas particularly felt this economic transitionas modernizing elites utilized their control of state structures to extendtheir power to the remote corners of the republic. It was also a time ofgains in social legislation, including new laws which dealt with the"Indian problem." One of the primary examples of this type of legis-lation was the 1937 Ley de Comunas which extended legal recognitionto Indian communities. In certain parts of the country such as in thecentral highland province of Chimborazo, Indigenous peoples quicklyembraced this comuna structure and formed more comunas than anyother area of the country (see Map 1). In similar situations in theneighboring countries of Colombia and Peru, Indian villages also usedlegal frameworks which the government imposed on their communitiesto petition for ethnic and economic demands.2

Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the 1997 meeting of the Midwest Associationfor Latin American Studies (MALAS) in St. Louis, Missouri, October 30-November 1, 1997, andthe 49th International Congress of Americanists, Quito, Ecuador, July 7-11,1997. Support for thisresearch during the summer of 1997 in Ecuador was provided by the American Historical As-sociation's Albert J. Beveridge Grant. The author would like to thank Licenciado Nogales forfacilitating access to the comuna records at the Dirección Nacional de Desarrollo Campesino,Ministerio de Agricultura, and Cynthia Radding, Kim Clark, and Silvia Alverez for their com-ments on an earlier draft.

The use of a capital "I" in reference to Indigenous peoples in this document is intentional andrepresents a strong affirmation of ethnic identity on the part of the protagonists. Furthermore, theplural "peoples" indicates the broad diversity among Indigenous groups not only in Ecuador butthroughout the Americas.

2 See Joanne Rappaport, Cumbe Reborn: An Andean Ethnography of History (Chicago: Uni-versity of Chicago Press, 1994) and Florencia E. Mallon, The Defense of Community in Peru's

531

532 COMUNAS AND INDIGENOUS PROTEST IN CAYAMBE, ECUADOR

Map 1: Comunas in Ecuador (1937-1973)

This essay examines the impact of the comuna legislation on Indig-enous protest movements in the canton of Cayambe in the northernEcuadorian highlands. In the 1920s and 1930s, some of the first andbest organized rural political organizations in Ecuador emerged in thiscanton. Indians on the expansive Pesillo hacienda formed militantunions which resulted in a protracted strike in 1931 over wages and

Central Highlands: Peasant Struggle and Capitalist Transition, 1860-1940 (Princeton: PrincetonUniversity Press, 1983).

MARC BECKER 533

working conditions that gave birth to Ecuador's modern Indian move-ment. 3 Nevertheless, Indigenous activists in Cayambe shunned the co-muna law and refused to take advantage of its provisions in order toadvance their political goals. Even today, in communities with radicalhistories of political organization, there is little interest in formingcomunas. The only areas of Cayambe which have formed comunaswere communities on the southern periphery of the northern core ruralprotest activities in the 1930s. To date not a single comuna has beenformed in the area of Pesillo which was a center of radical organiza-tional activity in the 1930s when the central government initially pro-mulgated this law (see Map 2).

Why, despite the apparent advantages of legal recognition, did In-digenous peoples in Cayambe refuse to utilize the comuna form oforganization to advance their rural organizing efforts? On the surface,this law appeared to have as its intent the defense of local communityinterests. It would provide them with a legitimate conduit throughwhich to agitate for and secure their demands from the central gov-ernment. Roberto Santana maintained that non-compliance through-out Ecuador was due to a variety of functional reasons such as igno-rance of the law, difficulty with the paperwork, racial discrimination,and pressure from hacendados.4 In the case of Cayambe, all of theseexplanations come up short. Searching for a satisfactory interpretationcan explain much about the nature of social organization and ethnicidentities in Cayambe and the basis which these provided for socialprotest.

Indians in Cayambe did not fail to comply with the decreed comunastructures because of a lack of organization or leadership skills. Do-lores Cacuango, Jesús Gualavisi, and others from this period are re-nowned for their abilities to organize strong community movements. Itwas not due to the remoteness of Indian communities. By the 1930s adeveloping transportation and communications infrastructure broughtnational and international capitalistic economic and political forces to

3 See Marc Becker, "Una Revolución Comunista Indígena: Rural Protest Movements inCayambe, Ecuador," Rethinking Marxism 10:4 (forthcoming Fall 1998) and Mercedes Prieto,"Haciendas estatales: un caso de ofensiva campesina: 1926-1948," in Ecuador: cambios en el agroserraño, Mi guel Murmis et al, eds., (Quito: Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales(FLACSO)—Centro de Planificación y Estudios Sociales ( CEPLAES), 1980), pp. 101-30.

4 Roberto Santana, ¿Ciudadanos en la etnicidad? Los indios en la política o la política de losindios. Francisco Moscoso, trans., Colección Biblioteca Abya-Yala 19 (Quito: Ediciones

Abya-Yala . 1995), p. 112.


Man 2: Rural Parroquias in the Canton of Cavambe

bear on this area. Nor was non-compliance due to resistance to outsideintrusion into their traditional lifestyles. During this time these Indianswere actively establishing alliances with urban leftists, labor leaders,and others willing to help secure for themselves more rights and alarger role as Indians and rural workers in the national culture. Why,then, this studied disinterest toward legislation which theoretically ad-vanced a defense of Indian concerns?

MARC BECKER 535

The government primarily targeted free Indian communities whichheld common resources such as land and water with this legislation.Over the centuries, many Indians (including those in northernCayambe) had lost their land and now worked on haciendas in asystem of debt peonage and service tenancy relations called the hua-sipungo system. This law did not intend for these huasipungueros whodid not own land to form comunas. After agrarian reform legislation in1964 abolished the huasipungo system and gave some Indians backtheir land, there was a virtual explosion in the number of comunas inother highland regions like Chimborazo as former huasipunguero com-munities adopted this form of social organization. 5 This same phenom-enon, however, did not occur in Cayambe. Particularly in areas withthe highest levels of activism, Indians chose to form cooperativeswhich allowed for more worker control over the means of production.They found the comuna form of organization inappropriate and un-desirable for their situation, and the legislation failed to address criticalissues which they faced.

Rather than embracing the formation of comunas as a way toachieve community empowerment, politically astute Indigenous lead-ers in Cayambe understood the law's intent to extend state structuresinto traditional communities with an ultimate goal of paternalisticallymanipulating local affairs. Activists interpreted this legislation as ameans for the elite to assimilate rural Indian communities into theemerging dominant blanco-mestizo culture and to undermine nascentleftist organizing efforts. This was part of a larger struggle for controlover the nature of society which was emerging in Ecuador. Would thecountry develop a western capitalist economy in which the wealth ofthe country would benefit a small elite? Or would economic produc-tion and political control be oriented toward local concerns and issueswhich would improve the lives of the country's large marginalized andimpoverished rural Indian masses? Indians in Cayambe rejected theprovisions of this law precisely because they wanted to defend theirpolitical space and economic interests, and to preserve their ethnicidentity.

LEY DE COMUNAS

A proper understanding of the Indian activists' rejection of the co-muna legislation must be placed in its broader political context.

Tanya Korovkin, "Indigenous Peasant Struggles and the Capitalist Modernization of Agri-culture: Chimborazo, 1964-1991," Latin American Perspectives 24:3 (94) (May 1997), p. 29.


Throughout the Americas in the 1930s, intellectuals and politiciansadvocated a variety of indigenista policies which they believed wouldsolve the "problem" of marginalized Indigenous populations throughgovernment-sponsored and controlled programs of integration into thedominant society. In Mexico, Lázaro Cárdenas enacted aspects of the1917 constitution which recreated and preserved the communal ejidolands under government protection. In the United States, John Collierimplemented the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act (IRA), which re-structured tribal governments. This legislation placed in power a groupof elite assimilated reservation politicians trained in western manage-ment styles. The result was a conflict between "traditional" leaderswho wanted to preserve their culture and ethnic identity, and "pro-gressive" leaders who wanted to introduce new and modern methodsof governance. 6 In both cases, elite white politicians subjugated theconcerns of the Indigenous peoples to their own economic and politicalinterests.

The Ecuadorian government promulgated the Ley de Comunas dur-ing a time of political turmoil and social unrest as elites fought forcontrol of state power. Twenty-one different chief executives occupiedthe presidency between 1931 and 1948 and not one managed to com-plete a term in office. At the same time, there was growing support forleftist political parties. After José María Velasco Ibarra fell frompower for the first of four times in 1935, Federico Páez served aspresident for two years. Páez was not formally affiliated with anypolitical party, although he did betray some leftist sympathies. Heinitially enjoyed support from some socialists and included two social-ist ministers in his government. He passed a variety of legislation whichdealt with social issues, including a labor law, social security, and anational welfare institute. Under the motto "social evolution, yes, so-cial revolution, no," he also proposed minor reforms of the country'sland tenure system. After a military uprising against his government,however, Páez became much more dictatorial. He created an atmo-sphere of repression, suspended civil liberties, restricted freedoms ofexpression, imprisoned and exiled his opponents (first from the rightand then from the left), and named a Nazi to the head of the police. Itwas in this atmosphere and toward the end of his government that Páez

6 Alvin NI. Josephy, Jr., Now That the Buffalo's Gone: A Study of Today's American Indians(New York: Knopf, 1982), pp. 219-20.

MARC BECKER 537

dictated the Ley de Organización y Régimen de Comunas (commonlycalled the Ley de Comunas or Law of Communes) on July 30, 1937.7

Páez articulated a notably liberal assimilationalist attitude in ex-plaining the purpose for this legislation. First, the existing Law ofTerritorial Division only recognized the larger administrative units ofprovince, canton, and parroquia (civil parish), and there was a need toincorporate the smaller population centers (which alternatively wentunder the names caseríos, anejos, barrios, partidos, comunidades, orparcialidades) into the nation-state. As a result, comunas were notgrassroots organizations, but part of the political-administrative struc-ture of the state apparatus. Second, Páez believed the governmentshould legally recognize these population centers in order to assuretheir social development. Finally, this administrative structure was nec-essary to tend to the moral, intellectual, and material development ofcommunities. 8 The social welfare minister's report for 1937 highlightsthe ideology underlying this law which originall y was to be called theLey de Comunidades Indígenas y Montuvias. 9 The law does not articu-late a desire to protect traditional community structures or grant

Indians more autonomy over their local affairs. The legislation was theoutgrowth of years of debate on how to resolve the "Indian problem"that ever since the colonial period weighted heavily on the country andprevented its progress. The government rejected the idea of dissolvingcommunities and distributing land to individual Indians. Despite theattractiveness of this proposal, this would degenerate into interminableconflicts and ultimately hurt national cohesion. Rather, the land wouldbe brought under ministerial control in order to oversee their activi-ties.

The promulgation of the comunas law in 1937 was not the first timethat the government considered imposing such structures. In 1930, thegovernment began plans to delineate the boundaries of Indian corn-

Patricio Ycaza, Historia del movimiento obrero ecuatoriana: De la influencia de la táctica delfrente popular a las luchas del FUT, segunda parte (Quito: Centro de Documentación e Infor-mación Sociales del Ecuador (CEDIME), 1991), pp. 17-25.

8 "Ley de Organización y Régimen de las Comunas" (Decreto no. 142), Registro Oficial, No.558 (August 6, 1937), p. 1517.

9 Virgilio Guerrero, Ministerio de Previsión Social, Trabajo, Agricultura, Colonización e In-dustrias, Informe que el Sr. Teniente Coronel S. Virgilio Guerrero presenta a la H. AsambleaNacional, Quito, a 10 de agosto de 1937 (Quito: Inprenta de la Caja del Seguro de E.P. y O., 1937),p. 31. "Montuvios' are semi-acculturated peasants on the Ecuado rian coast. See José de laCuadra. El montuvio ecuatoriano (ensayo de presentación) ( Quito: Instituto de InvestigacionesEconomicas de la Universidad Central del Ecuador, 1937).


munities in order to stop invasions of hacienda land. 10 In 1933 in theaftermath of intense organizational activity in Cayambe, the Ecuador-ian congress debated a "Project of Statutes for Agricultural Associa-tions and Indigenous Communities." Rather than defending the inter-ests of these communities, the intent of this legislation was to stopleftist organizing efforts in Indian communities and to draw the com-munities into the capitalist market. There was an urgent need to do thisbefore the communities became completely enveloped in the spread-ing ideas of regaining the land which they had lost over the centuriesto the surrounding haciendas.11

From a liberal point of view, the law was a brilliant compromise.Páez hoped that this legislation would help bridge racial divisions andcreate a harmonious, ethnic-blind society. It would mediate conflictsbetween individual and collective interests while providing a path toassimilate isolated Indians into the dominant mestizo culture. Further-more, the law would not compromise elite privilege and in fact wouldinsure its survival. In order to take advantage of this law, a communityhad to have held its land for at least thirty years. Indians trapped in thehuasipungo system on haciendas could not avail themselves of this lawto reclaim their lost lands. Modernizing hacendados were moving awayfrom the feudalistic huasipungo system and towards a system of wagelabor, and the comunas would provide them with a cheap and steadysupply of labor, which they could exploit without having to worryabout providing land, water, and other resources for their workers.The law could provide social stability in the countryside while at thesame time providing for capitalist penetration and consolidation ofpower and wealth in the hands of a small elite. Providing land, whichhas always been a primary Indian demand, would undercut growingdiscontent that led to independent leftist and Indian organizationalefforts in rural communities. The government hoped the law wouldstop rural protest dead in its tracks. Without these rural disturbances,agricultural production would flourish. Over twenty years later, eventhe social welfare minister of in the conservative Camilo Ponce En-

10 Francisco J. Boloña, Informe del Ministerio de Agricultura, Previsión Social, etc., a la nación,1929-1930 ( Quito: Talleres Tipográficos Nacionales, 1930), p. 48.

11 Hernán Ibarra C., La formación del movimiento popular: 1925-1936 (Quito: Centro deEstudios y Difusion Social (CEDIS), 1984), p. 71; M. R. Balarezoa, Ministro de Gobierno yPrevisión Social, Informe a la nación, 1932-1933 (Quito: Talleres Tipográficos Nacionales, 1933),p. 34.

MARC BECKER 539

ríquez government stated that the comuna had proven to be a goodsolution to rural Indian problems.12

In October 1938, the military replaced the increasingly dictatorialPáez with Alberto Enríquez Gallo, a nationalist military general withclear socialist leanings who enjoyed the support of a United Front ofsocialists and communists.13 Enríquez governed for less than a year,but managed to institute extensive social reforms during this time.Under his mandate, the government implemented the 1938 LaborCode based on the liberal 1917 Mexican constitution which articulatedextensive rights for workers and peasants. He also convoked a consti-tutional assembly in which socialist intellectuals played a significantrole, but conservative factions of the liberal party regained control ofthe government and prevent the passage of the progressive magnacarta.

As part of this program of legislating social reform, Enríquez expe-dited the Estatuto Jurídico de las Comunidades Campesinas (JudicialStatute of Rural Communities) on December 7, 1937. This statuteexpanded on the comuna legislation which Páez had promulgated fourmonths earlier. It declared the right for rural communities to exist andprovided for their social and economic development under the protec-tive arm of the state. The paternalistic nature and intent of this law areclear; it gave the government the obligation to protect and tutor therural communities. The social welfare ministry (Ministerio de Previ-sión Social) would mediate conflicts between comuneros. betweenmembers and the comuna leadership, and between comunas andneighboring private property. The ministry would carefully monitortheir activities including the maintenance of "scientific statistical con-trol," mediate any conflicts, and protect them from those who wouldprey on their ignorance. The legislation allowed little space for theindependent development of these communities, and it would alwayslegislate in the absence of the representation of those whom theseactions most directly affected.14

12 Nicolas Crespo Ordoñez and Ministro de Previsión Social y Trabajo, Informe a la nación,1960 (Quito: Editorial "Espejo" S.A,, 1960), p, xvii,

13 Jorge Salvador Lara, Breve historia contemporánea del Ecuador, Colección Popular 502(México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1994), p, 458,

14 "Estatuto Jurídico de las Comunidades Campesinas" (Decreto No. 23) Registro Oficial, Nos,39 and 40 (December 10 and 11, 1937), p, 2388. Also see Ecuador, Ministerio de Gobierno yPrevisión Social, Informe a la nación, 1938 ( Quito: Imprenta del Ministerio de Gobierno, 1938),p. 18; and Enrique Malo, Ministro de Previsión Social, Memoria mayo 1939-marzo 1940 ( Quito:


The Ecuadorian law does not explain the choice or use of the term"comuna" except that these were communities which had access to andadministered communal property. The term "comuneros" had longbeen commonly used to indicate members of Indigenous communities,especially those with "terrenos comunales" (communal land). Theword "comuna" comes from the French word "commune," a feudalterm which was synonymous with "municipality." The term implied afree city which existed under its own laws and whose inhabitants hadshared interests." This law did not create Indian communities; itmerely gave an existing institution legal recognition within the

nation-state.16 In reality, the use of this type of administrative structure tocontrol the activities of local communities had long existed under dif-ferent names. During the period of Spanish colonial administration,Indian communities struggled to protect their landholdings from theencroaching power of the creole hacendados. Many of these commu-nities had managed to function without formal recognition for hun-dreds of years and several had gained legal recognition before theimplementation of this law.17

The comuna law stipulated that all population centers with a mini-mum of 50 inhabitants were to incorporate themselves as comunasunder the jurisdiction of the parroquia in which they were located andregister the comuna with the social welfare ministry.18 Although thelaw mentions 50 inhabitants as the minimum size of a comuna, it doesnot stipulate how many of these community members needed to as-semble to form the comuna. Traditionally governmental officials re-quired a population center to have at least 50 heads of family to

Talleres Gráficos de Educación, 1940), p. 84. As president of the senate, Carlos Arroyo del Ríoabrogated this statute on March 4, 1939. because Indians were using its provisions to file com-plaints and demands. José María Velasco Ibarra reimplemented the statue on August 1, 1944. SeeC. Augusto Durango, Informe del Ministro de Previsión Social, 1939 (Quito: Imprenta del Min-isterio de Educación, 1939), pp. 156-57, Alfonso Calderon M., Informe a la nación, junio y julio1944 ( Quito: Imprenta Nacional. 1944), pp. 13-14, and Alfredo Rubio Orbe, ed., Legislaciónindigenista del Ecuador, Ediciones especiales del Instituto Indigenista Interamericano, no. 17(México: Instituto Indigenista Interamericano, 1954), pp. 97-98 and 101-102.

15 Franklin Bucheli García, Régimen de tenencia de la tierra en las comunas campesinas y sulegalización, Serie Textos Univeritarios, 4 (Azuay: Universidad del Azuay, 1994), pp. 15-16.

16 The government understood that comunas and communities were two very different con-cepts. See Malo, Memoria, anexo no. 5, p. 37.

17 Víctor A. González S., charts this history in Las tierras comunales en el Ecuador ( Guayaquil,Ecuador: Casa de la Cultura Ecuatoriana, Nucleo del Guayas, 1982).18

In 1959, administration of the comunas passed to the Ministerio de Agricultura y Ganadería(Ministry of Agriculture).

MARC BECKER 541

incorporate.19 The law explicitly states that both men and women fromthe community were to gather every December to elect the comuna'sleadership for the coming year. Indeed, both men and women partici-pated in these annual meetings and were listed on the membershiproles, although men usually held leadership positions in the comuna.Placing both men and women on an equal legal footing is ironic giventhat in the dominant society women did not enjoy such equality. Per-haps this was merely a covert recognition of the unique nature ofIndigenous societies in which gender roles were different from those inwhite society.

The law required each comuna to select a community council (ca-bildo) comprised of a president, vice-president, treasurer, trustee(síndico), and secretary. These were unpaid, voluntary positions. Theofficers, who were to be honorable and morally upright, met the firstSunday of every month to administer the community's affairs and tolook after the moral, intellectual, and material well-being of the com-munity members. Few other restrictions were placed on who couldfulfill these posts; a comuna's bylaws would occasionally mention thatthe president was to be at least twenty-five years old and the secretaryneeded to be literate in order to carry out the functions of that office.The law allowed for indefinite reelection for these positions. The presi-dent and secretary of the cabildo were to maintain a registry of every-one who lived in the comuna as well as an inventory of the communalproperty. They were to submit copies of these registries and invento-ries to the social welfare ministry in Quito.

Comunas were permitted to hold collectively material goods, whichbenefitted the entire community, such as pasture and farm land, in-dustries, irrigation canals, tools, and schools. If the community neededinvestment capital for an agricultural project, pending governmentalapproval they could mortgage communal property for a line of creditfrom a bank. The law did not include ethnic language or indicate thatonly Indians were to form comunas, even though it implicitly targetedIndians and emerged out of a context of elite discussions of how toresolve the "Indian problem." In reality, over time many differenttypes of communities formed a variety of comunas. Not all Indiansformed comunas, and poor whites and mestizos living in rural areasand marginalized urban barrios also availed themselves of the provi-

19 Bucheli, Régimen, p. 18.


lions of this legislation. Comuneros were involved in a variety of eco-nomic activities in addition to agriculture. On the coast, many comunaswere dedicated to fishing. Members of the Santa Clara comuna locatedon the urban periphery of Quito worked as bus drivers and bricklayers.20 Nevertheless, as indicated by and perhaps encouraged withthe judicial statutes governing comunas in rural communities, the vastmajority of comunas were formed in highland Indian communities.21Through the second agrarian reform in 1973, 1,604 communitiesthroughout the country formed comunas. The vast majority (80 per-cent) of these were in the highlands, with most of the rest on the coastand only eight in the eastern Amazon region. Most of these comunaswere in Chimborazo (331 comunas, or over 20 percent of the country'stotal), with a large number (214 comunas or 13 percent) in Cotopaxi.Pichincha. the province to which the canton of Cayambe belonged,also contributed a significant number of comunas (148, or almost 10percent) (see Map 1).

In the late 1930s after the passage of the law, there was a virtualexplosion in the number of legally recognized comunas as communitiesscrambled to comply with this new legislation (see Figure 1). Never-theless, many communities failed to elect cabildos, so in January of1938 the government allowed another year to comply with this law.22Although the Ley de Comunas dictated that all communities were toform comunas, and although Cayambe had a long history of grassrootsorganizations, this form of political organization remained rare in thecanton. In 1938, one year after the passage of the law, 255 comunas

20 Osvaldo Hurtado and Joachim Herudek, La organización popular en el Ecuador (Ecuador:Instituto Ecuatoriana para el Desarrollo Social (INEDES), s.f.). p. 19. For a general discussion ofcomunas, see Luciano Martínez V., `Sobre el concept de comunidad," Cuadernos de la realidadecuatoriana: El problema indígena hoy (Centro de Investigaciones de la Realidad Ecuadoriana,CIRE, Quito) 5 (1992), pp. 71-79. For a detailed analysis of coastal comunas, see Silvia G.Alvarez, Los comuneros de Santa Elena: tierra, familia y propiedad, Biblioteca de ciencias so-ciales; v. 34 (Ecuador: Corporación Editora Nacional, Ediciones Abya-Yala, 1991).

21 Osvaldo Hurtado observed a high degree of correlation between the formation of comunasand areas of the country with a high density of Indigenous peoples. Hurtado, Organizaciónpopular, p. 12. Leon Zamosc revisits these same issues and questions in Estadística de las áreasde predominio étnico de la sierra ecuatoriana: Población rural, indicadores cantonales y organiza-ciones de base (Quito: Abya Yala, 1995).

22 Alfredo Rubio Orbe, ed., Legislación indigenista del Ecuador, Ediciones especiales del In-stituto Indigenista Interamericano, no. 17 (México: Instituto Indigenista Interamericano, 1954), p.96. The law, however, never established penalties for communities which failed to comply withthis legislation. In 1940, the government made clear its intent to register new comunas on anongoing basis. Malo, Memoria, p. 82.

300

250

200

150

100

50

o

MARC BECKER 543

Comunas in the Sierra by Date of Formation

1911 1943 1953 1963 1973 1983 1993

Figure 1: Source: Leon Zamosc, Estadistica de las áreas depredominio étnico de la sierra ecuatoriana: Población rural,

indicadores cantonales y organizaciones de base ( Quito: Abya Yala,1995). pp. 90-91.

formed throughout the highlands but only one appeared in Cayambe.From the promulgation of the comuna law until agrarian reform in1964, only six communities in this canton adopted the comuna struc-ture (see Appendix and Figure 2). This was a minuscule percentage of

Comunas in Cayambe by Date of Formation

1911 1943 1953 1963 1973 1983 1993

Figure 2: Source: Comunas Jurídicas de la Provincia de Pichincha,Cantón Cayambe, Dirección Nacional de Desarrollo Campesino,

Ministerio de Agricultura, Quito.


the total number of comunas formed during these years. 23 In the tenyears after the 1964 agrarian reform during a time of one of the highestlevels of activism in terms of the formation of rural organizations, andin the context of huasipungo communities elsewhere in the countryrapidly forming comunas, only eight more emerged in Cayambe. Thiswas not even 1 percent of the country's total number of comunas. Thiswas one of the rare times that Cayambe followed rather than led ruralorganizational efforts in Ecuador.

Contrasting the nature, history, and experiences of two comunas inCayambe reveals why most Indian communities in Cayambe rejectedthe comuna structure. The first, Ascázubi Alto, was in many waystypical of the comunas formed in the Ecuadorian highlands during thefirst decades that the law was in effect. The second, Eloy Alfaro deYanahuaico, represents an attempt by Indigenous leaders to exploitthis law to their own benefit, an experiment which resulted in failure.These two comunas underscore that because of resistance to the ex-tension of centralized state power into local community affairs and thelaw's implicit attempt to undercut the force of growing leftist organi-zations, Indigenous leaders in Cayambe did not embrace the comunaform of organization.

ASCAZUBI ALTO

The inhabitants of Ascázubi Alto founded the first legally registeredcomuna in Cayambe in 1938, one year after Páez promulgated the Leyde Comunas. Located in the southern part of the canton in the parro-quia of Ascázubi (see Map 2), the comuna had about 400 members. Ina description in 1948, demographer César Cisneros Cisneros noted thatall of the comuna's inhabitants were Indigenous farmers dedicated toagricultural labor on their small plots of land on which they lived in animpoverished condition. Although their individual plots were small,the members communally held extensive tracts of pasture lands in thehigh páramo grasslands. Similarly, in a 1946 report, the teniente políticoof the local parroquia of Cangahua described the membership of thecomuna as exclusively Indigenous and dedicated to agricultural labor.The community counted among its communal riches two liters a sec-ond of water from the Guanquilqui irrigation canal. Minor industriesin the community included the processing of cabuya plant fibers used

23 In comparison, during this same period Indians and peasants organized 156 comunas in theprovince of Chimborazo. Korovkin, "Indigenous Peasant Struggles," p. 29.

MARC BECKER 545

in the construction of sandals, wool, and straw hats. Some membersalso worked as day laborers on neighboring haciendas.24

Bylaws from 1951 for Ascázubi Alto outline the goals of the co-muna, give a fair representation of the stated purposes for this type oforganization, and indicate how it was run. The comuna was to improveadministration of the communal páramo lands and provide technicalsupport for the improvement of cultivated lands. It was to create ed-ucational institutions, work on a literacy campaign, arrange for a medi-cal dispensary, and engage in public works projects such as the con-struction of a community building and plaza which were necessary forthe community's development. Members of the comuna includedpeople born in the community, children born elsewhere but who livedin the community, and people who married into the community. Com-munity members' responsibilities included sending their children toschool, and contributing twenty centavos a month to be used for theconstruction of a school and other public works projects. In exchange,members' rights included access to communal services including thepáramo pasture land and water, the right to elect leadership, economicaid in times of illness, and coverage of burial costs.25

For the most part, the administration of the comuna dealt withrather mundane issues. From the beginning, the comuna expressed aneed for access to water, the construction of a road to facilitate trans-portation, and the construction of a small market. Occasionally therewere disputes between comuneros over issues of pasture land, inher-itances, and leadership. In 1943, several comuneros complained to thesocial welfare ministry that their president was disreputable, exploitedcommunity members, and created difficulties with a neighboring ha-cienda over water rights.

A registry of community members in 1944 lists 397 inhabitants ofAscázubi Alto. That same year, however, only 58 community membersattended the comuna's annual meeting. This number had steadilyfallen from an all-time high of 78 in attendance when the communityformed the comuna in 1938. The number of people who regularlyattended community meetings later stabilized around 50 people. This

24 César Cisneros Cisneros, Demografía y estadística sobre el indio ecuatoriano (Quito: Tall.Graf. Nacionales, 1948), p. 192; Report from the teniente político of Cangahua, "Comuna As-cázubi Alto," Carpeta no. 55. Dirección Nacional de Desarrollo Campesino, Ministerio de Ag-ricultura. Quito, Ecuador (hereafter DNDC/MAG).

25 "Reglamiento interno de la comuna Ascázubi Alto," Carpeta no. 55, DNDC/MAG.


number perhaps corresponds to the number of heads of households,but the comuna legislation stipulated that both men and women wereto attend. Does this drop in attendance indicate a decreasing sense ofidentity with the comuna form of organization? Did people not findthe comuna worth the investment of time and energy? Or were mostpeople simply too busy with other jobs and chores, and chose to allowresponsibility for the comuna to be delegated to others? This lax atti-tude toward the comuna can be contrasted with that of the Indianworkers in Pesillo who in the 1920s formed the first peasant unions inCayambe under threat of expulsion from their hacienda.

It is possible that the micro-management of internal affairs by thenational government led the community's members to realize that theultimate purpose and function of the comuna was not to benefit thepeople who lived there. Rather, it was a form through which the socialwelfare ministry could impose its own ideas and policies into the com-munity. Twice the ministry added a provision to Ascázubi Alto's by-laws that required members to send their children to school or riskexpulsion from the comuna and loss of benefits. Twice the comunafruitlessly attempted to void this provision. Despite the ministry's ap-parent good intentions, the net result for the community was its loss ofautonomy and self-governance. The comuneros did not oppose theidea of educating their children, but the government schools did notrespond to the Indian reality and represented an assimilationalist forcedesigned to draw children away from their native culture. Further-more, despite the comuna's attempts to construct a school building,they did not have access to the funding and personnel to run theschool. Sending children to distant schools represented an unbearablefinancial burden. The comuna structure simply did not respond to localneeds and initiatives.

ELOY ALFARO DE YANAHUAICO

In contrast to Ascázubi Alto was the short-lived comuna experimentat Eloy Alfaro de Yanahuaico in the parish of Ayora in centralCayambe. Until the mid-1990s, this was the only comuna formallyestablished in this parish, with all others located in the southern part ofthe canton. On the surface, this appeared to be a fairly typical althoughsmall comuna. Its membership consisted of 38 men, 29 women, and 36children. Its main concern was a lack of land for its members. In fact,in all probabilit y the comuna was formed in an attempt to leverageland from the government. Even the selection of its name "Eloy Al-

MARC BECKER 547

faro" was perhaps an indication that its members would be more ag-gressive in their demands. Eloy Alfaro was the name of the liberalgeneral who led the 1895 Liberal Revolution and his name was asso-ciated with a defense of Indigenous issues and causes. The inhabitantsfounded the comuna on April 20, 1944, barely a month before a popu-lar uprising overthrew a repressive government and ushered in a pe-riod of social reforms which included the organization of a leftist laborunion and Indigenous federation. This influenced the future directionof this comuna.26

The comuna's bylaws stated that it was formed in order to defendthe collective interests of its inhabitants, to work for their moral andmaterial betterment, and to improve the Indigenous race. While thesegoals were laudable, they were not entirely uncommon for rural high-land comunas. What is more revealing was the attempt to includeclauses, which the ministry of social welfare subsequently deleted. Forexample, article 14 of their bylaws declared the comuna to be alcohol-free and penalized members for coming to comuna meetings or othersocial gatherings in an inebriated state. Although previously in a con-text of a world-wide prohibition movement this ministry had voicedsupport for ending drinking in Indian communities, it now struck thisaspect from the bylaws. 27 Previously elites on haciendas did not wantto lose the services of their contracted peon labor who would spend upto half the year in drunken festivals, whereas now with modernizingagricultural production and a surplus of labor it was more advanta-geous to keep these Indians who did not live on their haciendas in adrunken state. Was this an attempt to turn Indians from producers toconsumers? As José Carlos Mariátegui noted in neighboring Peru,previously Indians drank only chicha, a fermented corn beveragewhich they made themselves at home. Now, "the production of alcoholfrom sugar cane is one of the most 'secure' and stable businesses of thelatifundistas" who also exploited this vice to keep Indians in a subju-gated state.28 Underlying this dispute are issues of control over whoretains the authority to make decisions that affect a local community.

26 "Acto de formación de Eloy Alfaro de Yanahuaico," Carpeta no. 54, DNDC/MAG. All ofthe followin g. details on this comuna are from documents in this folder in this archive.

27 In 1925, the Ministry of Government and Social Welfare declared that alcoholism was oneof the primary causes of the Indian degradation, and it was the government's responsibility to endthis vice. See Julio E. Moreno, Informe del Ministerio de lo interior a la nación, 1926-1928 (Quito:Talleres Tipográficos Nacionales, 1928), p. 83; M. A. Albornoz, Informe del Ministerio de Go-bierno y Previsión Social a la nación, 1930-1931 ( Quito: Imprenta Nacional, 1931), p. 55.

28 José Carlos Mariátegui, "The Indigenous Question," The Heroic and Creative Meaning of


More significant for the history of this comuna and for the generalhistory of popular organizational activities for the canton of Cayambewas article five of the bylaws. This article indicated that the leadershipof the comuna would cultivate relations with other comunas through-out the country in order to work for the cultural advance of the people.The ultimate purpose of developing these relations was to organize anational congress of campesinos (peasants), comuneros, and montuvios(peasants from Ecuador's coastal region). Indian leaders throughoutEcuador were also pushing for similar concerns and would soon founda national federation, the Federación Ecuatoriana de Indios (FEI,Ecuadorian Federation of Indians), to struggle for Indigenous rights.29The government understood the political intent of this organizationalaction and struck this article from the bylaws. The intent of the co-muna legislation had been to undercut such organizational activities,not to encourage their development.

This set the tone for the direction that the comuna would soon take.Indians from Cayambe played a leading role in forming the FEI, andthe time seemed right to make a dramatic push to end fundamentallyunjust working and living conditions in Eloy Alfaro de Yanahuaico.The members of the community suggested that they lived in one of themost backward and impoverished areas and were in desperate need ofland. On August 27, 1944, less than three weeks after the founding ofthe FEI, the comuna met in an emergency session and formed a com-mission of four people to address these concerns. Matias Arroyo, thevice president and one of the founders of the comuna, informed thegovernment that now that they had formed a comuna they were ex-pecting matters to improve for them. He noted that haciendas sur-rounded the comuna. Unlike traditional service tenancy relationswhich accompanied working as a huasipunguero on a hacienda, thesecommunity members were not allowed to pasture animals in the highpáramo grasslands. Landholders also denied them access to naturalresources such as water and firewood which agricultural workers onthe haciendas had traditionally assumed to be their natural right andoften formed the basis for survival strategies.

The comuna presented a proposal for a solution to their problems tothe government. Nearby were two haciendas, Cariaco and Paquistan-

Socialism: Selected Essays of José Carlos Mariátegui, Edited and Translated by Michael Pearlman,Revolutionary studies (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1996), p. 98.

29 Federación Ecuatoriana de Indios, Estatutos de la Federación Ecuatoriana de Indios( Guayaquil: Editorial Claridad, 1945).

MARC BECKER 549

cia, which the government owned and were administered as part of theAsistencia Pública (Public Assistance) program within the same min-istry of social welfare under which the comuna had been organized. Aliberal government had confiscated these haciendas from the CatholicChurch in 1908, and the proceeds from their exploitation were to fundwelfare projects such as hospitals and orphanages. Eloy Alfaro deYanahuaico asked the government to give the comuna some land fromthese haciendas. After all, the government had sold the neighboringTupigachi hacienda to retired military personnel and had similarlydivided up government-owned haciendas elsewhere in the country.

3°The government flatly refused. The haciendas were rented to landlordsfor an eight-year period, and Cariaco was at the end of its lease. Thecomuna proposed that perhaps the government would rent them thishacienda. The proposal received no official action.

Members of the community were beginning to become desperate.What possible course of action remained open to them? José MaríaVelasco Ibarra had returned to power in May 1944 based on the sup-port of the lower classes, but he had turned on his former allies andnow completely supported the wealthy conservative capitalist elite.Ecuador was experiencing an economic boom based on banana pro-duction, but none of this wealth trickled down to the Indigenous peas-antry. The members of the comuna had lost all faith in both the gov-ernment and their existing leadership to solve these problems andtherefore sought out new and more radical leadership. Members of thecommunity gathered on November 20, 1948, to elect a new executivecouncil. No one who was elected at this meeting had previously ap-peared on the comuna's membership roles, and they were probably notpermanent residents in the community. Dolores Cacuango was unani-mously selected to serve as the president, as were Aquiles Quishpe forvice president and José Campúes for treasurer. By a majority vote LuisCatucuamba won the position of secretary and Abiquel Quishpe theposition of síndico (trustee).

Cacuango the woman they brought in to lead the comuna, was a, veteran of Indigenous struggles in the canton of Cayambe and one ofthe primary symbols of Indigenous resistance in Ecuador. She wasborn on the Pesillo hacienda in the northern part of the canton of30

Edmundo Pérez Guerrero, Colonización e inmigracion en el Ecuador ( Quito: Edit. Casa dela Cultura Ecuatoriana, 1954), p. 151.


Cayambe in 1881. Like most Indigenous peoples born in the nine-teenth century, she had to work from a very young age and neverattended school or learned to read or write. Although illiterate, shefought tirelessly for schools for Indigenous communities and was in-strumental in setting up the first bilingual schools in Cayambe.Cacuango maintained an active presence organizing meetings of haci-enda workers and demanding land rights. She played a leading role instrikes at Pesillo in 1931 and rose to a position of leadership in thestruggle against the hacienda system. A hacienda administrator com-plained that "this pernicious woman" helped Indians build houses onhacienda land even though they did not have a formal contract to do50. 31 A newspaper article from the 1940s described her as at the headof Indigenous struggles, the last to retreat, and always ready to sufferfor the cause. 32 Because of these activities, Velasco Ibarra threatenedto exile her to the Galápagos Islands in 1946. The local priest inCayambe attempted to bribe her so that she would stop leading In-digenous revolts, but she continued her work for a more just society.33Cacuango was actively involved in broader political struggles in thecountry, including leading the May 1944 revolution in Cayambe,founding and leading the FEI, and serving on the Central Committeeof the Ecuadorian Communist Party for which the government laterimprisoned her.34

A week later, Manuel Rodríguez, the teniente político for the parishof Ayora, sent a note to the undersecretary of social welfare. Heclaimed that the comuna could not continue to function because its

31 Letter from Juan Francisco Sumárraga to Director, Junta Central de Asistencia Pública(JCAP), March 21, 1946, in Correspondencia Recibida, Segundo Semestre, Segundo Parte, 1946,p. 1555, Archivo Nacional de Medicina del Museo Nacional de Medicina "Dr. Eduardo Estrella,"Fondo Junta Central de Asistencia Pública in Quito, Ecuador (hereafter JCAP); Letter from C.Anibal Maldonado, Administrador, to Jefe, Department() de Haciendas, Asistencia Pública,October 10, 1946 ( Oficio no. 27), in Correspondencia Recibida, 1946, JCAP. For basic biograph-ical data on Dolores Cacuango, see Osvaldo Albornoz Peralta, Dolores Cacuango y las luchasindígenas de Cayambe ( Guayaquil: Editorial Claridad S.A., 1975), and Raquel Rodas, Crónica deun sueño: las escuelas indígenas de Dolores Cacuango: una experiencia de educación bilinge enCayambe (Quito: Proyecto de Educación Bilin ge Intercultural, MEC-GTZ, 1989).

32 "Dolores Cacuango," Antinazi (Quito) 2:19 (April 17, 1943), p. 4, facsimile edition in Ray-mond Mériguet Cousségal, Antinazismo en Ecuador, años 1941-1944: autobiografía del Mov-imiento Antinazi de Ecuador (MPAE-MAE) (Quito: R. Meriguet Coussegal, 1988), p. 214.

33 Rodas, Crónica de un sueño, p. 63.34 A photo in Elías Muñoz Vicuña, Masas, luchas, solidaridad, Colección Movimiento Obrero

Ecuatoriano; No. 8 (Guayaquil: Universidad de Guayaquil, 1985), p. 91, of a Central Committeemeeting in Quito, July 26-28, 1947, shows seventeen people, of which Cacuango is one of threewomen and the only Indigenous person.

MARC BECKER 551

members had not properly cared for it and were unconcerned aboutthe direction it took. A letter from Segundo Cabezas, who had servedas president of the comuna since its founding, was more specific in hiscomplaints. The November 20 meeting which elected the new cabildoviolated the 1937 Ley de Comunas on two counts: it did not meet in themonth of December, as stipulated in article 11, and the teniente po-lítico was not present at the meeting, as required in article 12. Adissident faction sought to run the comuna independently of centralgovernmental rule. Everything was out of control, he said, and hecould do nothing about it.

After this correspondence, the comuna of Eloy Alfaro de Yanahua-ico disappeared from government records. It proved such a threat tothe established order that the social welfare ministr y dissolved thecomuna and assigned its administrative number to another comuna.Eloy Alfaro de Yanahuaico, therefore, does not appear in any lists ofactive or inactive comunas. It provides, however, an example of a localIndigenous community attempting to utilize this legal framework toclaim control over its own affairs and the government responded byrefusing to allow that to happen. It indicates that the governmentbelieved that the purpose of this community was not to encouragedissent, but to provide for a means for central government control overand intrusion into local community affairs. The failure of this experi-ment in using this organizational form to force social changes assuredthat in the future Indigenous leaders in Cayambe would not look tothis system to improve their lives.

This development perhaps retarded but did not entirely halt theformation of other comunas in the canton of Cayambe. In Decemberof 1944, eight months after the formation of Eloy Alfaro de Yanahua-ico but several years before it ceased to exist, Paccha Pucará becomethe third comuna in Cayambe to legally incorporate itself. As withAscázubi Alto, it was located in the southern parroquia of Cangahuaand also represented a rather traditional trajectory for comunas in thisarea of the country. Members of this comuna worked as day laborerson the neighboring Carrera and Pisambilla haciendas. The land whichthey owned never was part of a hacienda. Rather, it was marginal landat the agricultural frontier which the comuneros brought under culti-vation. 35 After Paccha Pucará, 11 more years passed before the next

35 Cisneros, Demografía, p. 192. Later, Paccha Pucará divided into two comunas with onetaking the name "Paccha" and the other "Pucará."


comuna legally incorporated itself in the canton of Cayambe. Onlyfour more communities in Cayambe were to organize themselves ascomunas before the 1964 agrarian reform law.

A CRITIQUE OF COMUNAS

A study of popular organizations in Ecuador defined the comuna as"the oldest form of peasant organization, with pre-colonial and colo-nial origins." It was the result of the merging of an Inka form of socialorganization (the ayllu) with that which the Spanish conquest imposed(the comuna). Despite the legal requirements and organizational struc-tures, according to this analysis, the comunas preserved a large part oftraditional Indigenous governing mechanisms, including redistributiveand exchange networks and other aboriginal social structures. 36 Manyscholars have traditionally adhered to this interpretation, but it ignoresthe type of traditional community organization in Cayambe.

Located in northern Ecuador, Cayambe had been incorporated intoTahuantinsuyo, the Inka empire, only within a generation of the Span-ish conquest and only after a 17-year long and bloody battle against theinvaders. Very little research has been conducted on the nature ofCayambe's social organization before these two conquests, but there isno indication that they utilized the ayllu form of organization. In allprobability, the Spanish, with their Cuzco-centric view of the Andes,imposed this label on communities it sought to subdue after the 1569Toledan reforms. 37 As the pan-Indian organization Confederación deNacionalidades Indígenas del Ecuador (CONAIE) noted, the Spanishconquest fundamentally and irreparably disrupted the traditional so-cial structure on which the government allegedly constructed the co-munas. 38 Some earlier scholars, perhaps inadvertently, had given cre-

36 Instituto de Estudios Ecuatorianos (IEE), Políticas estatales y organización popular ( Quito:Instituto de Estudios Ecuatorianos, 1985), pp. 124-25.37

Salomon notes that early informers in northern Ecuador simply refused to use Inka termslike "ayllu." See Frank Salomon, Native Lords of Quito in the Age of the Incas: The PoliticalEconomy of North Andean Chiefdoms (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 14,122 and 173. Similarly, Powers recognizes the foreign origins of this concept but utilizes the termbecause of the success of the Spanish colonial power in imposing the label. Karen Vieira Powers,Andean Journeys: Migration, Ethnogenesis, and the State in Colonial Ouito (Albuquerque: Uni-versity of New Mexico Press, 1995), p. 12. Caillavet cautions against the inappropriateness ofusing foreign terminology to understand a local reality. Chantal Caillavet, "La adaptación de ladominación incaica a las sociedades autóctonas de la frontera septentrional del Imperio: (Terri-torio Otavalo-Ecuador)," Revista Andina ( Cuzco) 3:2 (December 1985), 419.

Confederación de Nacionalidades Indígenas del Ecuador (CONAIE), Las nacionalidades

MARC BECKER 553

dence to the view of the comuna as a fundamentally European ratherthan Indian construct when they traced the legal tradition of this lawback to Spanish colonial administration rather than traditional Indig-enous community structures. 39 Diego Iturralde consciously traced thecabildo system of governance as a legacy of Spanish colonial admin-istrative structures which Simón Bolívar attempted to impose on In-dian communities to retain control over them. 40 With little identifica-tion with any aspect of the structure this legislation created, it is nothard to understand why communities in Cayambe would not anxiouslyembrace it. The provisions of the law were far removed from theirsocio-cultural reality.

A second and more fundamental critique of the comuna legislationconcerned its extension of state power one step further into the localcommunity. The national government in Quito directly appointed of-ficials who oversaw local affairs, the teniente político on the parishlevel and the jefe político at the larger canton level. They were civil-military authorities who had the power to impose fines and to makearrests. The person appointed to these positions was always a "mestizobien blanco," a person who culturally came from an elite class.41 To-gether with the local parish priest, who was also either a white ormestizo, the teniente político and jefe político worked hand-in-handwith the large landholders (hacendados) to consolidate control overrural society. By the mid-nineteenth century, these secular authoritieshad displaced the power of the traditional ethnic lords (alternativelycalled kurakas or caciques).42 No one in the Indian communities hadany control over these appointed officials who were notorious for theirabusive behaviors and represented the extension of coercive whitestate power into local Indian communities.

indígenas en el Ecuador: Nuestro proceso organizativo, 2d ed. (Quito: Ediciones Abya-Yala,1989), pp. 31 and 131.

39 See chapter two ("Las comunas indígenas") in Piedad Peñaherrera de Costales and AlfredoCostales Samaniego, "Comunas juridicamente organizadas," Llacta (Instituto Ecuatoriano deAntropología y Geografía (IEAG), Quito) 15 (November 1962), pp. 48-66.

40 Diego A. Iturralde, Guamote: campesinos y comunas, Colección Pendoneros, No. 28( Otavalo, Ecuador: Instituto Otavaleño de Antropolo gía, 1980), p. 113. See Art. 18 of SimónBolívar, "Establecimiento de la contribución personal de indígenas," in Nueva Historia del Ec-uador, Volumen 15: Documentos de la historia del Ecuador, ed. Enrique Ayala Mora (Quito:Corporación Editora Nacional, 1995), p. 116.

41 Moisés Sáenz, Sobre el indio ecuatoriano y su incorporación al medio nacional (México:Publicaciones de la Secretaría de Educación Pública, 1933), pp. 130-31.

42 Andrés Guerrero, Curagas y tenientes políticos: La ley de la costumbre y la ley del Estado(Otavalo 1830-1875) (Quito: Editorial El Conejo, 1990).


The comuna legislation indicated that the central government wasno longer willing to allow its power and control to stop at the parishlevel. Through the maintenance of registries of comuna members andproperty, the government converted community members into agentsof state power. The teniente político was to control and administer thelocal cabildo. The teniente político (and if he was not available, the jefepolítico from the canton) were to preside over the annual comunameetings, monitor elections of the cabildo, and communicate theseresults to the central government. It was easy for the teniente político(sometimes in coordination with the parish priest) to manipulate thevoting process for the cabildo in order to assure that malleable personsresponsive to governmental demands would be in charge of the co-muna. The presence of foreign authorities such as the teniente políticowho controlled the election of community authorities and mediatedinternal conflicts caused resentment in Indian communities. 4» The Leyde Comunas explicitly expressed an intent to control and negate localdecisions if they were not favorable or convenient to the government.Article 14 reserved for the social welfare ministry the right "to elect adifferent cabildo which successfully represents the interests of the co-muna."44

As a result, communities would end up with cabildos which servedthe government's interests rather than that of the community. Theleaders would not consult the community on issues which concernedthem, and would become authoritarian and create serious internaltensions in the community. The people selected to lead the comuna didnot represent the traditional leadership of the community. The gov-ernment intentionally utilized the comuna legislation to undermineand replace these traditional authority figures. 45 Often the result wasparallel authority structures, with the traditional authorities cominginto conflict with the one which the government imposed. This wouldfurther lead to a sense of alienation among community members to-ward the comuna structure, partially because the entire process ofselecting leaders by voting rather than through consensus and tradi-tional authority lineages was foreign to the normal decision-makingprocess and partially because the resulting leaders reflected the intru-

43 CONAIE, Las nacionalidades indígenas, p. 131.44 "Ley de Organización y Régimen de las Comunas," p. 1518.45 Malo, Memoria, anexo no. 5, p. 37-38, and Carlos Andrade Marín, Informe que el Ministro

de Previsión Social y Trabajo presenta a la nación, 1941 ( Quito: Talleres Gráficos de Educación,1941), p. 103.

MARC BECKER 555

sive state power which the government wielded rather than embracingthe community's interests and concerns.

Without authority (sometimes called poder convocatorio or convo-catory power), comuna leaders were unable to mobilize support forcommunity projects. For example, Segundo Basilio Flores, the presi-dent of the comuna of Chinchinloma in the southern parish of SantaRosa de Cusubamba in Cayambe, complained to the social welfareminister that the community members did not comply with their ob-ligations including participating in assemblies and communal work par-ties (minus). He requested that a governmental official visit the co-muna and compel the members to follow his directions. 46 Without asense that the comuna benefitted the community, interest and partici-pation in the comuna declined and sometimes comunas would disap-pear entirely. This was not because of reactionary, isolationist, or tra-ditionalist attitudes, but the result of a government in which they hadno voice or citizenship rights which now wanted to micro-manage theirlocal affairs. From this recognition, it was one small step to rejectentirely the comuna structure.

Resistance to government control over local affairs extended be-yond Cayambe. Osvaldo Hurtado determined that in 1972 only 47percent of the comunas in Ecuador had sent the names of their cabil-dos to the social welfare ministry. One interpretation of this statisticwas that the comunas had ceased to function and therefore had notelected new leaders. Hurtado raises an alternative interpretation thatdue to negligence or in order to avoid expenses the comuna had heldtheir election without the presence of the teniente político, the localgovernmental official who normally communicated this information tothe ministry. 47 An alternative explanation which Hurtado does notdirectly consider is that Indigenous community structures functionedperfectly well without outside intervention and thus saw the presenceof the teniente político to be unnecessary and perhaps even resentedthe meddling of governmental officials in local affairs. Some commu-nities formed comunas but never officially registered them with thegovernment and thus remained beyond the reach of the patronizingand assimilating state structure. After all, what benefits did this inter-

46 Letter from Segundo Basilio Flores to Ministerio de Previsión Social y Comunas, 13 Feb-ruary 1970, Carpeta no. 111, DNDC/MAG .

47 Hurtado, Organización popular, p. 15.

556 COMUNAS AND INDIGENOUS PROTEST IN CAYAMBE , ECUADOR

vention bring to the community? Not communicating this informationbecame what James Scott called an everyday form of resistance to theinsertion of central governmental control and state structures into alocal community.

Not only did the comuna legislation represent a negation of tradi-tional authority structures, it was also originally designed as an attackon independent leftist political organizing efforts. The comuna legis-lation must be understood within the context of the type of extensionof state power which its authors desired. Insistence that the tenientepolítico monitor elections and that the comuna send inventories of itsbelongings and the names of its inhabitants and leaders to a centralministry meant that the government would more easily be able tomonitor and stop leftist organizing efforts in the communities. Thegovernment attempted to exercise direct control over peasant organi-zations in order to shield them from the influence of labor and othermore radical organizations. As was apparent with Eloy Alfaro deYanahuaico, the government was not interested in organizations whichoperated independently of its control. Comunas had always been de-signed to draw rural communities away from dissident organizations.

The government had an authoritarian intent in establishing regula-tions covering the governing of comunas, with the power to modify orreject organizational structures which were not to their liking. Accord-ing to the Instituto de Estudios Ecuatorianos (IEE), this was becausetraditional Indigenous forms of social organization were "consideredanachronistic and a bad habit left over from the past." 48 Rather thanpreserving local social, cultural, and economic values, the Ley de Co-munas had a strong modernizing intent that sought to bury Ecuador'sIndigenous past in favor of assimilating rural communities into anemerging capitalist order.

All of this is not to imply that Indigenous leaders in Cayambe andtheir supporters never used the comuna structure to advance their ownsocial and political interests. A politically astute leader and organizerwill be able to use any available tools to advance the community'sinterests. For example, in 1971 ex-huasipungueros invaded the haci-enda La Libertad in the parish of Cangahua to claim land for theircomuna. Pedro Miranda, the owner of the hacienda, denounced the

48 IEE, Políticas estatales, p. 135.

MARC BECKER 557

Indians as working against the economic development of Ecuador andin favor of subversion, disorder, and chaos. Miranda claimed that Dr.Bolaños from the FEI was behind the formation of this comuna andwas using it to attack his interests. 49 Increasingly, the FEI took anactive interest in utilizing the comuna structure as a means to presstheir agenda for a redistribution of land and a true agrarian reform,particularly in areas of the country where previously the organizationhad not had a strong presence. Some Indians were able to utilize thecomuna structure for their own ends, including defense of their eco-nomic, political, and ethnic interests.'°

Although the government claimed this legislation would assist com-munities with their social, moral, intellectual, and material develop-ment, ultimately its intent was to incorporate small population centersinto the country's formal political and administrative structures. Itsgoal was to draw communities into a national cash economy and in-crease their dependency on outside forces to the benefit of the whiteelites while at the same time negating leftist organizing efforts. The neteffect was an attack on Indigenous autonomy, self determination, tra-ditional authority structures, and cultural identity. Indian communitiesstood to gain little from such a move. The battle over comunas repre-sented a division between two fundamentally different visions for thenature of political, economic, and social structures to be constructed inEcuador.

The 1937 Ley de Comunas proved to be a conservative force in ruralsociety, and Indigenous leaders in Cayambe recognized the legislationfor what it was. They applied a critical political analysis to the situa-tion. As the failed attempt at Eloy Alfaro de Yanahuaico demon-strated, this legislation would not lead to the long-needed profoundstructural changes in society. Within the context of a paternalistic so-ciety, this law would only prove to deepen Indigenous dependency onthe dominant culture. It did not open the way for cultural rejuvenation

49 Letter from Pedro Miranda to the Ministerio de Previsión Social, Trabajo, y Comunas, 29March 1971, Carpeta no. 144 (Miranda La Libertad), DNDC/MAG. For other examples of Indianactivists who used the comuna structure to advance their political goals, see A. Kim Clark, "NewStrategies of Resistance in the Ecuadorian Highlands: Peasant Actions and Discourse, 1930-1950," unpublished manuscript

50 Despite the original limitations of the law, Roberto Santana maintains that recently Indianshave transformed it from legislation "a los" Indians to "de los" Indians. Santana, ¿Ciudadanos en

la etnicidad?, pp. 114-15.


or defense of ethnic interests, but represented an assimilating forcewhich worked against their own self interests. The Ley de Comunasdid not provide for access to land, political autonomy, or economic selfsufficiency. Those in Cayambe who wished to gain political space forIndigenous rights issues were forced to look elsewhere for avenuesthrough which they could reach these goals.

Gettysburg College MARC BECKERGettysburg, Pennsylvania

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Appendix : Location and Date of Legal Registration of Comunas in Cayambe

Comuna Parroquia Date of RegistrationAscázubi Alto Ascázubi September 23, 1938

Paccha Cangahua December 30, 1944

Pucará Cangahua December 30, 1944

Carrera Cangahua April 21, 1955

Monjas Alto Juan Montalvo May 14, 1955

Sayaro Juan Montalvo December 10, 1960

Chinchinloma Santa Rosa de Cusubamba March 21, 1962

Guachalá Cangahua April 26, 1968

Porotog Cangahua March 25, 1969

San Pedro de Cangahua Cangahua April 11, 1971

Chaupiestancia Otón September 20, 1971

Miranda La Libertad Cangahua November 1, 1971

San José Cangahua April 7, 1972

Cochapamba Cangahua August 9, 1972

Chambitola Cangahua August 9, 1972

Cangahuapungo Santa Rosa de Cusubamba July 7, 1976

San Luis de Guachalá Cangahua May 18, 1979

El Llano Otón October 14, 1981

Coniburo Cangahua December 21, 1981

Candelaria Cangahua April 18, 1984

Izacata Cangahua April 16, 1985

Milagro Cangahua May 19, 1989

San Francisco de Otoncito Otón March 25, 1993

Chumillos Cangahua July 26, 1994

Hato de Chaupiloma Juan Montalvo September 6, 1994

Cariacu Ayora Febniary 7, 1995

Pisambilla Cangahua October 13, 1995

Santo Domingo No. 2 Ayora March 7, 1996

Source: Comunas Jurídicas de la Provincia de Pichincha, Cantón Cayambe, Dirección Nacional

de Desarrollo Campesino, Ministerio de Agricultura, Quito.

Documents

COMUNAS AND INDIGENOUS PROTEST IN CAYAMBE, ECUADORmarcbecker.org/research/comunas.pdf · 532 COMUNAS AND INDIGENOUS PROTEST IN CAYAMBE, ECUADOR Map 1: Comunas in Ecuador (1937-1973)